Week 10: Break/Broken

Last week was spring break. Although I value the restorative powers of a break and feel that at least one is essential in every semester, I take exception to the fact that over the course of a break, all the routine, momentum, and discipline that have taken eight weeks to get in place are irrevocably broken. Not unlike a size 2 needle that has been stuffed in a backpack that is then stuffed in a locker.

Week 6: Rain, Rain

A persistent rain kept me from a walk this morning, but I wouldn't trade it for all the sun of summer. It made hunkering down with a cup of coffee, the dog, and some Death Cab (perfect rain music) all the cozier.

And knitting--can't forget the knitting. I retrieved the Lace Leaf Pullover from my knitting basket on Saturday when I ran out of yarn on my commissioned project (remind me to reveal that), and I'm already past the little leaf motif (which I am quite taken with) and on to the rounds of plain stockinette for the body. When you've got a mountain of discussion posts to read, it's nice to have something simple in your hands. If I had the time to watch my knitting, the yarn (Twisted Sisters Jazz) would be entertainment in and of itself. It's been a while since I've worked with a handpainted yarn, and it's fun to watch the color variations come into the fabric and layer atop the shades from the previous round.

But I'm going to have to forgo knit-watching for a while here--we've just passed the first quarter of the semester, and things are starting to speed up!

Week 3: It Never Fails

Well, it's Monday again, and guess what? I haven't gotten anything done.

Clarification: I got in a hike (picture of the telegraph lines above the trail), and completed my correspondence--which would have gone better if it involved me in an Empire-waisted dress with and a writing desk, not me in a Skellington hoodie with Gmail and Safari dropping my wireless at every opportunity. Now, I am attempting to get all my assignments for the week in order, but the clock is winning, and I'm going to drop everything half-done to get ready for a concert for which the tickets were bought eons in advance. I hate that--'cos it's all going to be there, half-done, when I lurch out of bed too early tomorrow morning.




In other news: did anyone else catch the annual dose of pop culture that is the Grammys? I took the opportunity of a couple stationary hours to knit and knit and knit on the bottomless pit that is Hermanita's Warm-Up. Since everyone can't stop by to work a round and see the bottomless-pit-ness in action, there's a picture looking into its depths.

As always, the show had its moments, but there were also several moments that made me shudder. Like the Jonas Brothers. And the Kings of Leon, some of whom also happen to be brothers. I'm noticing a theme here.

Also shudder-worthy was the Zac Brown band, which beat out Silversun Pickups as best new artist. *What* were they thinking? I mean, I would argue that Carnavas was the album that "established the public identity of the artist," as the award criteria states. But but rather than quibble, how about we give the award to the people with talent?

I managed to keep knitting while thoroughly dissecting this and basically the entire show con las hermanitas y mamá tambien, and wonder of wonders, I now only have two inches to go before dividing for the Warm-Up front and back. Take heart--knitty news may soon prevail!

Week 16: Such Great Heights

I liked that song when it was a radio song, but I came to absolutely love it when my Pandora started playing it and I learned the lyrics. The freckles in our eyes are mirror images... *sigh*

That song has nothing to do with Week 16 of this or any semester, except for the title. Once madness starts, it begins to escalate, and reaches such great heights more quickly than any sane person could contemplate in Weeks 1-4.

On one hand, I am trawling through research papers about people looking up health info online and scribbling down hypotheses, samples, and variables like I've got good sense. The madness here is not that I have no interest in medicine and would be an abysmal health librarian. I chose the topic because UA also has a med school, so they have just about every volume of every medical journal available online and I could spend the next 10 years doing this without ever hitting that "article not available" dead end.

The madness is inherent in the repetitive nature of the assignment--hypothesis, sample, variables, outcomes, write it all down and move on to the next article. I'm not trying to diss my professor here--he's here to teach students how to assess the quality of research, and by jiggy, I'm learning how to assess the quality of research. But I'm on article 5 of 10. Hypothesis, sample, variables, outcomes... *giggle*

Other hand: Hermanita's Christmas gift has hit a snag. Did I mention I have no pattern for this gift? I don't. I'm cobbling it together as I go along. When I said madness, I meant madness.

She and I are almost the same size, so I was banking on the accuracy of my schematics and being able to try it on as I work to make sure the pattern is working. Only I didn't have enough to try on until last night, when I discovered that my pattern is not, in fact, working, and I have to rip back 4" of work. Alack, alay, oh woe, oy vey. On the bright side, my schematics are bang on!

Week 13: Abominable Monday

I am fully aware that there is enough bad karma floating about in this world, and there will be even more tomorrow, and I don't need to add to the load, but I have been racking my brains for a week 13 post all day, and all that comes to mind is this:

Today has been the nastiest in a long line of abominable Mondays. I don't know what it is about Mondays, but I have endured a long string of unpleasant ones these past many weeks, and today pretty much takes the cake. One of those days where you *do* stuff for hours on end and yet accomplish nothing, and which defeats every attempt at salvage (and I've made several attempts at salvaging it). Bleugh.

My one little bit of happy: I finished the left front of Mum's Thundercloud Cardigan over the weekend and am into the waist shaping on the right front--the last piece.

Pomp and Circumstance

Yesterday, I graduated (yes, I am still alive). It was quite the Event, with everyone bundling out of bed and into their winter best to be at the arena by 7. We left early to beat the horrible traffic and the backup at the road leading into the parking structure, neither of which materialized.

There was, however, the staging, which one of my fellow graduates described as "reverse hazing." I think all of us expected to be herded into the nether regions of the arena to wait the hour between when we had to arrive and when we marched in. Oh no. We were shooed back outside to the arboretum across the street to wait, for an hour, in the pre-dawn cold. Ok--so this isn't like Chicago or Toronto, but still. All but one of the Anthro graduates were girls, and not a one of us was dressed to be standing outside in 40º cold without coats. Adding insult to injury, we had to spend the entire hour staring at the Political Science graduates waiting in front of us, most of whom were guys who were heartlessly warm and relaxed in their solid shoes and suits with warm pockets.

I survived, thanks in large part to having worn Hermanita's Firebird under my gown, and finally, shiveringly, we were paraded into the auditorium. The customary pomp and circumstance, set to Pomp and Circumstance, followed, and then, finally, they began to read the names.

After ages of waiting, walking was over in a flash. I got up to the stage without mishap, I stepped forward at the right time, I took the diploma case with the correct hand, and I was not the girl who wiped out going down the stairs (I felt so sorry for her, but it made the day of the guy placed at the bottom for just such an accident).

And then it was all over. I'd said goodbye and good luck to all the students I knew while we froze to death in the arboretum, to the advisor at the Anthro department's reception, and to one of my favorite professors (not at the Anthro reception, ironically, but in line at the café we went to for lunch afterwards). Still, it didn't sink in until I was going to bed that I would never again wait for a class to start in the dim Anthro lobby, never wedge myself into a too-small wooden desk and read the graffiti on the back of the desk in front of me while the person behind bumped my back with his/her knees, never curse the name of some past culture and/or that of the professor teaching us about them. It was all rawther saddening.

Shortly thereafter, it occurred to me to wonder what the heck I was going to do all spring.

I think I might be able to come up with something.

Week 8: Like Frogged Bamboo

A glorious cold snap and the arrival of Socktoberfest inspired me to finally act upon my simmering sock obsession. These two skeins topped my list:


Rio de la Plata Sock Solid in Seaweed



and Panda Wool in Strawberry Pink.

The Panda Wool got precedence because it's destined for giftiness, and I began a pair of Hedera.

Then midterms came along, and my gauge tightened like a hungry boa constrictor. Behold the result:



That's kind of how my brain feels now, after three midterms in two days. I am not overly hopeful about the results, but I don't know that I care. Major case of senior bad attitude, I know, but the sock is back on track now, and that's enough to make me happy.

Week Six: Slipping

While Mayas and King Henry (the fourth, part 1) and article reactions pile up around me, I'm feeling rawther like I'm slipping a bit.


Por ejemplo: It didn't occur to me until after I'd picked up all the stitches for the sleeve of my FBS that I would have to knit it in the round. I suppose I won't mind the seamlessness, but I'm having some gauge issues.


My big accomplishment for the week: data sheets for my very first true research project. This one won't be me putzing around on JSTOR and giving a presentation on half a dozen articles written before I was born: this will be me, collecting data on real nonliving potsherds and hopefully not making a complete fool of myself when I present my findings to my classmates.

Grand excitement.

Week 5: Beetle-Headed Villains

Why is it so terribly difficult for people to create PDF files with pages all oriented the same direction? I hit print hoping to shortcut the painful slogging through of articles I have to complete this weekend and came out with two properly printed pages and 13 page middles.

Augh.

On the bright side, my Shakespeare class is teaching me lots of useful vocabulary.

Week Four: the Amoeba Evolves

Four down, twelve to go. My trusty knitting bag has not failed me yet, and the Mystery Christmas project is moving along.

My February Baby Sweater had been languishing in the basket for lack of time spent at home, but a moment of extreme duress brought on by the realization that I have a substantial paper to finish by Friday (tomorrow) brough it back out.



It has gone from amoeba on a stick to blob on a stick, but if you split up the sections, voilà--



It's a miniature sweater (sans sleeves). Although part of the calming power of this sweater is that there's no deadline and no recipient to impress, I'd love to see what it looks like on an actual baby.

Pretend

I suppose my last entry would've been a good time to mention that school started and I won't be able to blog as often as I'd (or you'd) like until mid-December.

And I don't have any pictures of my current project, because it is a top-secret Christmas gift for Hermanita, who actually reads here.

But I have been knitting! My kit bag has become my everything-but-the-kitchen sink bag, holding my knitting, my writing implements, and my purse notions. After forgetting my locker key so many times my boss suspiciously asked if I'd lost it, I threw everything in the bag and don't leave the house without it.

With my knitting always handy (and my pattern memorized), I can pull out my knitting any time and pretend that I haven't a care in the world. I can pretend that I am getting Important Things done (nevermind that mongo Pottery Analysis book sitting at home), and I can pretend that I've gotten so far on this, it's a matter of a week or so before I start a new project, like this skirt in the new Knitty, which had to go live just as the semester blossomed into a many-headed hydra. I can pretend that the weather is veering dangerously towards cold (today's high: a nippy 96), and turning all this woolyness into warm goods is a matter of dire importance.

One thing I will not do is pretend that blogging is something I Positively Must get done. Does that sound counterintuitive? According to normal logic, yes. According to my logic? Not at all.

The Zen of the Scantron

This morning I had a novel test-taking experience. For one thing, all the stuff I studied for was on the exam. No we-downplayed-this-in-class-because-we-planned-on-devoting-an-entire-test-section-to-it questions. All the answers were on the paper, to be matched, chosen, or true-falsed. The answers did not have to be hand-written; we bubbled our answers in on a scantron.

I think the scantron was what really made the test. I haven't had one for ages--always those too-involved questions followed by too-small blanks--so there was the novelty factor. But even more, there was something reassuring about the tangibility of the little darkened oval. The answer is here, and it fits inside this one little bubble. A, B, C, D, or E, not some abstruse concept with a dozen possible interpretations. No shades of gray, unless you brought the wrong hardness of pencil.

Following in the vein of the unexpected is my mystery picture from last week's non-post.



Inside that box are all the umpteen squares I have been knitting for what seems like eons (roughly three years). I had a square-knitting frenzy right before Mum's birthday, and am now four squares short of a lap blanket (interpret that statement as you will). In short, I am ready to begin the finishing process. Normally, I avoid that part of a project like the plague, but after knitting away so long on a seemingly endless portion of my stash, I am quite thrilled. I did a program last summer where participants knitted (hypothetically) 6-inch squares out of horrible scratchy machine washable Red Heart and its ilk for a twin-bed sized blanket, and after sewing that behemoth together, this will be a piece of cake.

My modus operandi:
Mattress-stitch squares together using embroidery floss (the yarn is too softly spun to sew with)
Knit remaining squares as needed
Put some sort of border on (I was thinking i-cord in black because muted goldish-green is possibly the world's most difficult color to match)
Present it to Mum and keep a good distance from patchwork for a few years

I'd say that sounds like a good plan, wouldn't you?

I Think Uncharitable Thoughts

I am blogging now, fifteen minutes before I'm supposed to get myself together for class, as an alternative to throwing myself on the floor and tearing off my epidermis.

Exegesis: I am very allergic to perfume. Nasty allergic. Last semester, someone used a Guess perfume sample--one of those little cards the women at the perfume counters at department stores spray with the latest scent (after dousing you with said scent) and insist you take along--as a bookmark in a library book about archaeology. I don't know how long it was there, but by the time I got to the book, every page in the two inch thick tome reeked, and I sustained an attack getting my class readings done. Until I discovered the offending sample card, I would've sworn that someone had soaked the whole thing in some sort of laundry detergent.

Well, apparently the culprit is a serial perfumer. I bought my textbook for this class used, and what do you know--I open the thing, and a distinctive laundry detergent scent wafts up in my face. Martha offers a remedy for odiferous books, but it takes a month--not to mention two lidded garbage cans and kitty litter--to take effect. My class will be over and done with in another three weeks, so my better option is to suck it up. Mark my words, though, if I catch the culprit, retribution will be exacted.

In knitty news, I'm making this with this.

Happy Earth Day

My university surprised me: usually every day with a cause results in an onslaught of supporters and opposition on the campus, with everybody shouting, waving signs, and thrusting clipboards at you. There was none of that today--not even a bleak documentary scheduled to show on the big mall after sunset. I was rawther surprised, but I can't complain; people with clipboards are to be avoided at all costs.

My contributions to the planet:

I took the bus to school...

Took class notes on recycled paper...

Ate my organic peanut butter sandwich I had packed in a little box (plastic, por desgracia)...

Recycled my Starbucks cup...

And took the bus home.

The Icarus is not the world's best blog project. It looks like a dead woollen jellyfish the entire time it's on the needles, which is usually considerable. Here are a few notes on this particular rendition:

I bought three skeins this time, not two, so we should avoid any unpleasantness
The color is "Polar Morn," which is more in keeping with the color shown in the magazine.

And yes, this is another pictureless post. If you want to see pictures, check out what Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's up to.

Bad Blogger

Quanto lo siento. I think I've just broken about every rule known to blogdom. I subjected you to unsolicited griping, I got off topic, and then I disappeared.

(In case you were perplexed by the picture, Skalbagge is a stuffed pillbug, one of my growing collection of Ikea creatures. Its mouth unzips to hold pajamas or whatever strikes las hermanitas' fancy.)

The carpet is gone, the tile is in, and we are beginning to put the house back together again.



I survived my tests, thanks in large part to the cookies my History of English teacher provided. By the last one, though, I was starting to get a little punchy. I was actually doodling in the margins of my test. I don't know what got into me. I'm not a doodler, and I can't draw to save my life. Maybe it was the pen. That particular professor makes us do our tests in pen, and I must say, I do love gel ink. Whatever the cause, I hope the TA finds the little pictures of tarsier skulls and rockets and whatever else I put on there (I don't even remember) endearing rather than distressing.

Anyway. Knitting. I swear, I really and truly have been knitting. What I've been knitting is really proof of the way my mind bends:



Yes, it's another Icarus, in more Malabrigo. Doesn't anyone else knit lace to unwind? If you check out the Icarus knitalong, every other post contains a comment askance about how boring knitting the body is. Maybe to the knitter in a better frame of mind, it is. For me, nothing is more calming than those orderly quills of stockinette. I memorized the pattern working on Hermanita's Firebird, and so now, I can pull it out in class, in between class, or while reading



and zip through a row to keep from going right off the deep end.

This weekend, I have a feeling I'll get a lot of knitting done. I have two presentations, due Tuesday, to finish. One is on interproximal grooves, and the other is on the Spanish conquest. Given a choice, I'd do the former twice and say to heck with the latter. I mean, honestly. Grooves in harmless little teeth or the bloody initiation of three centuries of genocide, cultural destruction, and oppresion--do you really even have to think about that one?

Final Sale

Every semester, right around midterms, when I'm feeling least charitable towards institutions of higher learning and yearning most for a break, registration for the next semster opens. I hate that. Each time, it feels like you're selling your soul--in advance.

So this Friday, registration opened once again, and I sold my soul away...for the last time. Barring alien invasion, my university being razed to the ground, and/or loss of multiple limbs, this fall will be my last semester.

(As an undergrad. But we won't talk about grad school right now.)

Woohoo!!!!!!

I'm so excited.

In knitty news, I finished the Patternless Stash Shawl. It is a behemoth.



I rawther like it, and it looks good on me.



(Maybe not with my Shins shirt.)

As the temperature climbs past 80, I don't find myself with a pressing need for a shawl, however, so I'm not sure what I'll do with it.

But it is finished. This means that all the yarn is used up, right?



Not quite.

I Witness the Fall of Modern Civilization

I spend most of my afternoons in the university library, doing homework to kill time before my evening class. Most days I can get a coffee in before I head over there, but today my schedule was all mussed about, and I arrived at the library before I had gotten through the foam atop my latte. Rather than chug it, I went to Circulation to ask them if there was anyplace I could stick it while I grabbed the one book I needed.

"Just take it with you," the girl behind the desk told me, as if I were being ridiculous.

Millions of dollars worth of books, not to mention all the computer equipment, and they're going to let any and every undergrad traipse about with brimming Grande hot vanilla lattes?

The world is most definitely going to the dogs.

Leap Year

A History of English assignment is looming over my shoulder, but I have to get a post in tonight; this is leap year manifest.

I used to love little trivia-type things like today. I suppose I still do, but as a full-time student part-time deskperson, it's just not the same.

Forgive the melancholy, but I had my ego crushed this morning in a Dental Anthropology lab practical. Augh. I will be the first person to agree that one's ego can always do with a poke, but here's something to keep in mind: one's ego is crammed in quite close to one's spirit. Crush one and the other gets a bit bruised.

So as not to make this post really bleak, here's a picture:



These have been my school knitting. My History of English professor (who abbreviates the class title most disconcertingly. Add "Language" to the title, acronym it, and see what you get) and Archaeology professor have both okayed knitting in class. Quant requires too much looking to do in class, so I've been knitting squares--to borrow a favorite phrase of the professor for Dental--ad nauseum. They chew through the yarn most encouragingly, and depending on the amount of new material in each lecture, I get get one done in a school day and a half. So far I've got six. At this point, completing *anything* gives me a little tweak of accomplishment, but by the same token, I do believe I've gotten to the point where starting a seventh would bring me ad nauseum.

Let's see what I can dig out of the tote.

Little Things

The minute, the curtailed, the packable seem to be taking over my life.

Lunch fits in a box.

My working memory is about the same capacity as a floppy.

And any knitting larger than a washcloth seems an insurmountable task of Hurculean proportions.

Why? Because it's back-to-school time. Not the rejuvenated-by-summer, won't-this-be-fun, brand-new-clothes fall back to school. The back-to-the-grind, when-will-it-all-end, at-least-it's-not-500-degrees-yet spring back to school.

However, I take the bus to school, and many semesters of experience have taught me that doing homework on the bus is futile until Panic Time. Binders have a tendency to slide onto other riders' laps (or worse, dig into their legs) as the bus swings around a tight corner, and my multitasking skills are not so developed as to allow reading and people-watching all at once.

Knitting would be the perfect solution to this dilemma, and I've got a small project in the pipeline that may perk up the bus ride, make me feel productive, and use up some stash yarn.

Quant

SAS made a really elegant version. That was part of my inspiration, but I happened to have some Crayola colored sock yarn in my stash that has been causing me no end of grief every time I turn it up in my rummagings. These two partial skeins have been in there so long, they're starting to stress me out. Do you have yarn like that?

On a more somber note, tonight two pairs of handknit socks bit the dust. They the first two real pairs of socks I knitted, and Hermanita had to steel me to do the deed. I was seriously debating darning up the worn spots on the toe decreases of my absolute favorite pink pair, but then I discovered that the place under the ball of the foot was going, and so was the base of the heel. I keep telling myself there was nothing I could do. *Sigh* Such is the fate of hugely functional items.

Rome is Burning

If one is trying to highlight the Roman emporer Nero's insanity, the anecdote about him playing his fiddle while Rome burned is a good one. There are lots of others, but this is the one I remember. It came to mind today in particular. If ancient historians had not left ample evidence that Nero was a bubble off, I would say that he fiddled as Rome burned as a means of not freaking out.

Let me set the stage: I have a take-home Linguistics exam due Tuesday. I have part one of my Spanish final in class on Tuesday. Osteology's final is Thursday, Death and Dying in a Cross-Cultural Perspective on Friday, and next Monday is part two of my Spanish final.

And what have I done today? I cleaned out my knitting bag, unraveled a stash blanket that's been sitting on the needles for over a year, cleaned out my armoire, gathered some items to put in the charity drop bin at the library, dusted my room, and even cleared out some old magazines I haven't touched in ages.

All while the proverbial Rome is up in flames around me. Thank goodness I don't have a fiddle, because I'd probably find an entire symphony that I needed to practice right now.